From the U.S. Government Accountability Office, www.gao.gov
Transcript for: Gender Pay Differences among Low-Wage Workers
Audio interview by GAO staff with Andrew Sherrill, Director, Education,
Workforce and Income Security
Related GAO Work: GAO-12-10: Gender Pay Differences: Progress Made, but
Women Remain Overrepresented among Low-Wage Workers
Released on: November 3, 2011
[ Background Music ]
[ Narrator: ] Welcome to GAO's Watchdog Report, your source for news and
information from the Government Accountability Office. It's November 3,
2011. While women represent an increasingly larger share of the total
U.S. workforce, their average pay has been, and remains, lower than that
of men. A group led by Andrew Sherrill, a director in GAO's Education,
Workforce, and Income Security team, recently reviewed the differences
in representation, characteristics, and pay among women and men with
less education and low wages. GAO's Jeremy Cluchey sat down with Andrew
to learn more.
[ Jeremy Cluchey: ] This report builds on GAO's body of work looking at
the difference between men's and women's pay in the workforce. Can you
talk about what you focus on particularly in this report?
[ Andrew Sherrill: ] That's right, last year we issued a report on women
in management, in which we compared women and men to see to what extent
they're represented in management, their pay levels, etc. This report
we're issuing today is a bookend to that. This report focused on women's
progress in the workplace compared to men for two less advantaged
populations. First, less educated workers, those with a high school
degree or less, and second, low wage workers, which we defined as those
earning in the bottom 20 percent of hourly wages.
[ Jeremy Cluchey: ] For the low wage workers, what did you find that the
differences are between men and women currently?
[ Andrew Sherrill: ] We found that women have made progress in earning
higher wages over the last 3 decades but that they remain
overrepresented among workers who earn low wages. In 2010, women were
about 49 percent of the total workforce, but constituted 59 percent of
the low wage workforce. But we didn't find any differences between men
and women in this group in terms of pay differences in part because the
minimum wage provides a floor. When you shift and look at the weekly
earnings of men and women in this group, we did find some differences,
and that's in part because women's weekly earnings were less than for
men on average because women are more likely to work part-time. In this
low wage group, 41 percent of women worked part-time compared to 26
percent of men.
[ Jeremy Cluchey: ] And for women and men who are in the group
considered to have less education, what differences did you identify?
[ Andrew Sherrill: ] Our key finding was that women with a high school
degree or less earn lower wages than men who have a high school degree
or less. And this is the case even though women in this group had
greater high school graduation rates than men and were on average about
3 years older than men. The key part of the explanation is that women
tend to work in occupations and industries that pay lower wages than in
those where the men worked. For example, the largest industry for women
was healthcare and social assistance, where women earned about $14 per
hour. In contrast, two of the industries that have sizeable percentages
of men--construction and transportation--men earn more than $19 an hour.
We also found that even when less educated women and men worked in the
same broad industry or occupation, women tended to earn less on average
as well. However, when we looked over time, we saw that pay differences
have decreased somewhat. In 2000, less educated women earned 81 cents
for every dollar that less educated men earned after we adjusted for
different factors that can affect pay. Compare that to 2010, where we
found that the pay difference had decreased by 5 cents down to 86 cents
on the dollar for every dollar earned by men.
[ Jeremy Cluchey: ] In terms of women's representation in the workforce,
how have you found that the situation has changed over the past 30
years?
[ Andrew Sherrill: ] As the workforce has grown over that period of
time, women have represented an increasingly larger share. Women now
constitute nearly half of the workforce, which is an increase of about 6
percentage points over the last 30 years. Also, over this
30-year-period, women have surpassed men in obtaining high school
diplomas and college degrees. For example, younger women, those aged 25
to 34, now complete high school and college at somewhat higher rates
than men, and we've found that education plays an important role in
reducing the likelihood of being low wage.
[ Jeremy Cluchey: ] For people interested in the trends around pay
disparity between men and women, what's the bottom line of this report?
[ Andrew Sherrill: ] The bottom line is that while women have made
progress over time in both wages and education levels, we still find
that there's differences in pay, for example, between less educated men
and women and also women being overrepresented among low wage workers.
And these raise questions about to what extent the remaining pay
differences that we find are due to the choices women make--for example,
balancing work and family responsibilities--and to what extent they
might be due to other factors like barriers or discrimination that women
encounter.
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[ Narrator: ] To learn more, visit GAO's website at gao.gov and be sure
to tune in to the next edition of GAO's Watchdog Report for more from
the congressional watchdog, the Government Accountability Office.